Urban foxes in England’s number has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, according to a study which estimates there are about one for each 300 residents, or nearly 150,000 in England.

While the number of foxes has been falling overall in the united kingdom, the analysis by Brighton and Reading universities has discovered that Bournemouth tops the charts with the highest concentration of urban foxes in the united kingdom in 23 per square kilometre.

London wasn’t far behind with 18, followed by Bristol with 16 and Newcastle together with 10.

The researchers, led by the biologist Dawn Scott along with the behavioural zoologist Phil Baker, requested residents to report sightings through July and August from 2013 to 2015, and labeled foxes to monitor their interactions and territories.

Bournemouth may be slightly more convenient than the regions in London we studied to encourage increased fox numbers,” she said.

Through combining the sightings with units they were able to produce calculations of the density of foxes in towns and cities.

It is thought there were just 33,000 foxes living in towns and cities during the 1990s, and a 2014 research discovered that 91% of metropolitan regions formerly predicted to encourage few or no foxes in the early 2000s now have them.

Trevor Williams, one of the creators of The Fox Project, that has worked with a fox rescue agency and wildlife hospital as 1993 and advises councils on humanist fox deterrents, contested the idea that numbers are increasing. His group observes foxes in metropolitan, suburban and rural locations.

“I think what is happening is that we’re taking more than rural locations and therefore the foxes that live there turned into urban foxes, but another thing which springs to mind is that possibly the preceding studies underestimated because of poorer research and samplings.

“I just don’t see that the people has increased at all in terms of enquiries, or in terms of casualties. We get around 700 to 750 coming in to our hospital and we raise about 220 and 250 cubs every year, which hasn’t changed in several years,” he said.

Whether urban foxes are dangerous has been a point of emptiness for several years. There were widely reported cases of foxes killing young children and maiming babies in towns, but based on the RSPCA, such events are rare.

Ian Tokelove, a spokesman for the London Wildlife Trust, stated he wasn’t surprised by the findings. “It is what we find in the roads around us. They are way more typical. They have a time out in the countryside and in most places like London they can discover a great deal of the meals they need and the habitats that they need. There’s plenty of worms in our own gardens and they’re particularly partial to the rats and mice of London.

“I think Bournemouth is probably leafier and greener than London, so it’s not a surprise that Bournemouth has longer, but a lot of people do not realise that London supports a massive amount of wildlife.”